Willow Tree
by Soheil
Summary: After Garth's death, Donna grieves. The Tower does, too. In a way.


_"What does it feel like, to be a Willow Tree?" the child asked._

_The mother smiled and stroked the child's hair. "The Willow Tree will bend in the rain, but never breaks."_

* * *

Donna Troy had thought she was past breaking. Even as her life burned to flames, even when she made mistakes, she had held strong. She hadn't broken then. But crouching, shaking behind the crates, huddled on an empty airstrip, her arms felt ridiculously light. They should have been holding something, she knows. _She should be holding something. _Garth just lay there, not 10 feet away, expression still half hopeful.

It's ironic that was what had made the hope drain out of hers.

Her thoughts come in disjointed, jumbled waves.

She realized her body had stopped fighting Jillian. It upsets her that the body is still on the ground. His body. It should be fighting, just like hers. Whoever shot him could very well be still out there, but she needed to hold the body.

Garth shouldn't have had to be alone.

Garth shouldn't have even been here.

The last thought hammers through get mind, bouncing every which way before echoing out into the void. There's nothing else, anymore.

She had run to the Titans, he had fallen in love with her.

She had run away, he had fallen to save her.

And he had kept falling.

And she had kept running.

Her destiny was to run. His destiny was to fall.

They couldn't escape that, no matter how hard they tried.

And they would never, ever do it together (Not anymore).

She shivers and stays put. Two Titans have turned into ghosts tonight.

* * *

_"What if the winds are too strong, mother?" the child questioned after a moment._

_"What then, of the Willow Tree?"_

* * *

The first day back is chaos, under a carefully maintained air of calm. Somehow, everyone knows what's happened, and as soon as she arrives, they offer hugs, words of reassurance, and queries of feelings. Well, Dawn does. As soon as she arrives, Dick gives her a nod, and holes himself down in the console room. Hank stays, a reassuring presence in the room when she sits on the couch, shivering slightly.

Dick announces that he's found Garth's shooter and they all gather in the console room, staring at the blurry picture, along with the profile Dick's pulled up.

Slade Wilson. The name means nothing to her, makes her feel nothing.

She feels like it should. The rest of the Titans seemed to be filled with this righteous anger, but none of them know where to direct it, and after vowing to get Slade, they're at a loss. Dick mentions pursuing an angle on the sniper's family, and leaves as quick as he can, suiting up in a jacket and jeans instead of Robin. Dawn wants to go with him, but he waves her off, saying it's just preliminary stuff

Hank leaves to patrol, spouting lies about some gang that needs to be taught a lesson.

They all know he's going to go take his anger out on two-bit criminals, but Donna can hardly complain. After all, she would have gone with him if she could have.

She feels like she's been caught in a rip current that's pulling her under, and even though all she's trying to do is swim parallel to shore, she can't even tread water.

Her day is mostly spent sitting on the couch, wrapped in blankets, eyes closed. From behind her, the city lights wink cheerfully at her.

She can't stay in her own room anymore, she can't even look at Garth's. The kitchen has the remnants of party decorations, and there's still a piece of cake left in the fridge, along with an orange soda.

She doesn't feel hungry, anyway.

* * *

Hank returns from the patrol at the same time Dick returns from wherever he was and they immediately get into an argument that quickly escalates into a screaming match, because Dawn's on a supply run and Ga- no one else is here to break it up. Except Donna herself, but she doesn't have the energy to throw herself into the fray.

It's not technically a screaming match- Hank does all of the screaming on his own. Dick's eyes are fixed on the wall, and occasionally, they flick around the room, but his lips are firmly shut. He seems determined to avoid looking at her or Hank, but she doesn't miss the way his eyes shutter as he looks at Garth's party decorations. Donna lets her own eyes slide closed and tunes out every single word they're saying.

It's not the first time she's had to do this.

Long after Hank's voice has become hoarse, and he's turned into more of Hawk than human, he shuts up quite suddenly.

Donna frowns and opens her eyes again. Hank is staring at Dick. Dick is staring at the floor, and there are tears dripping down his face. Silent, few, but nonetheless, present.

Dick Grayson is _crying_. Robin, the hardened accomplice of Batman himself, is _crying_.

That hurts everyone more than they want to admit.

Hawk slowly retreats until he turns into Hank Hall again, a Hank Hall who mutters a curse and backs out the door, practically tripping over his own feet.

They're falling apart, and it hasn't even been a day yet.

She can't believe she wanted to leave.

She's not sure if she's still entirely here.

Dick just stares into empty space for a second, then glances quickly at Donna and then away again. He hastily wipes his face and glances at her nervously again, as if he might have somehow offended her. It's clear that he's avoiding her, but it's not clear why.

He leaves, too, after Dawn returns. A few hushed conversations later, the tower is empty and blessedly quiet.

That's strange, though.

She's supposed to be the one that runs.

_"Strong winds can only break the branches," the mother admits, softly, with confidence, "Only ice and time have the power to destroy the Willow Tree."_

Hank returns before Robin and Dove do, and he stinks of liquor. He plops down on the sofa across Donna, curling into himself so much that he almost looks like a child.

"There were supposed to be five of us," he whispers in a broken voice, and Donna's stomach twists.

She shakes her head. "I'm sorry," she says, her first words in hours. Pain and disuse make her voice tremble.

Hank looks up and makes eye contact with her. "It's not your fault," he says simply, then promptly passes out.

Donna sighs, and shoves at him with her feet until he's shifted on his right side, and tosses her blanket over him.

That one sentence made her feel stupidly a bit better. It gives her enough strength to stand up, something she hasn't been able to do all day. Her legs wobble a bit, but she stays upright. She moves one foot in front of the other, making her way across the floor. Her hand barely shakes as she pours a glass of water, and sets it on the side table next to Hank.

As she glances at the clock, a new sense of urgency comes over her. The night is hardly young, and patrol will be over in an hour.

Donna hurries down to the console room, shaking off the feeling that she's doing something horribly wrong. If Dick's hiding something from her, it could endanger the whole team, she reasons. Plus, she wants to see if he's gotten any headway on finding the sniper. It wouldn't surprise her if he had known and was biding his time to go off on his own. At least Dawn had gone with him on patrol. She'd keep him from doing anything relatively stupid.

Tapping her fingers against the keyboard, Donna pulls up all the open windows and flicks her finger up, protecting all of them across the wall. Some news articles were arranged on to the side, along with a scan in progress. The picture in the center, though, was the one that took her breath away. Even with the blurry resolution and faded memories, Donna could see the figure in her mind's eye.

She was staring down the barrel of a gun again, only this time, she could do something. She smashed her hand against the keyboard, purging the images from the wall and leaving a sizable dent in the keyboard. It's only when her lungs start burning that she realized she's forgotten to breathe. She slides out of the chair and onto the floor, sliding under the desk to stop the walls from closing in again.

She's in the Titan's Tower.

A tower.

Not an airstrip, not underwater.

She felt like she was freezing under the sea, and this time, there was no clownfish to coax her out.

She reaches out her hand blindly on the floor next to her, looking for something, _anything_, to ground her into reality. She comes up with a piece of paper that's glossy on one end and rough on the other. Even with the dim lighting, she can make out one blinding smile, and one forced one.

_A Polaroid._

Not the one Dawn had just taken and given her, that's safe in her room. This is a different one, taken earlier. A rare picture of all five of them. Almost.

The edges are jagged and that's what breaks her out of her stupor. Someone's ripped off a side of the photograph, leaving less than half of Garth's face and smile.

Dick finds her on the floor, searching for the rest of the memory.

* * *

_"But what if the neighbor takes an ax to its slender trunk?"_

_"What then, of the Willow Tree?"_

* * *

"What the _hell_ are you doing here?" Dick's voice is strained, and his eyes are bloodshot. His domino mask is crumpled in his scraped fists, and Donna feels a flicker of sympathy for whichever thug had decided to get in Robin's way tonight.

She doesn't feel fear at all, not of him. They've known each other too long for that. You can't know someone too long for anger, though, and she can feel it bubbling up as she holds up the half of the Polaroid.

His expression morphs from anger to apathy in an instant. It's worse than his usual mask, and she's actually offended that he's trying it on her.

"Why did you tear this?" she asks calmly, "Where's the rest of it?"

Wordlessly, he shrugs and tries to take the picture from her hands, but she jerks it out of reach.

"Do we mean _nothing_ to you, Dick? Is this what's going to happen to all of us in the end? We die, and you cut us out of old pictures?"

"At least I didn't spend the entire day huddled in a sofa instead of helping the members of the team that are actually alive!" he snaps back suddenly, his voice laced with venom.

She takes a step back, her heart thundering in her ears. If she doesn't get herself under control fast, she's going to do something she'll regret.

Dick flinches at his own words, but doesn't give any apologies. They're past that now.

Instead, Donna retakes her place at the chair, stares at the computer for a second, and opens up a random camera clip of Garth's birthday on the screen. Seeing him, smiling and moving, opens up a hole in her chest that she had just barely re-patched. Dick sidles up beside her and sits on the table, watching the scene unfold in front of them. With the sounds filtering from the speakers, it was like they were still there.

If only they were still there.

Sighing, she nearly clicks out of it, but then frowns. The timestamps were strange, almost as if-

"Donna," Dick has been watching the screens carefully, but now he turns back to her. His voice is calm, but there's something like panic in his eyes that shows her that she's found something he thought she shouldn't. She knew he was hiding something.

"There's a clip missing in this series," she says slowly, "What are you doing?"

"Donna, please," Dick shakes his head, "Just drop it." The fact that he's not giving her an excuse should be reason alone to leave it, but she's not exactly thinking rationally, and neither is he. So she ignored him and directs herself to the Recycling Bin, pulls the video file out.

She should have known something was wrong. Dick's never this careless.

The video opens up normally enough. Garth is walking into the kitchen with a spring in his step, and runs into Dick, whose expression resembles a storm cloud. She checks the time stamp again and freezes.

_No._

This can't be happening.

_Nononono-_

_"_You told him where I was." Donna's voice is shattered, and she curses herself for being so open, but it doesn't matter. If Dick hadn't told Garth where she was, he'd be alive.

"Yeah," Dick nods, not even looking the slightest bit ashamed, "And you know what? I don't regret it at all."

In less than a second, she's up out of the chair, and slams him against the wall. She's using her full strength, and she doesn't even care. He deserves it, and more.

"You sent him to his _death_," she hisses, a tear slipping out of the corner of her eye, "You're _heartless_."

Dick stares back at her with wide eyes, and she can see the anger, the grief, the _guilt_ pooling behind them.

"You think I don't know that?" he whispers, his breath tickling her face, "You think I don't know that if not for me, he'd be here right now?"

Donna just gave his shoulders a shake, pushes him back against the wall.

"You're acting like Batman right now!"

Dick looks just as broken as she is. Oh God, what if they all are?

"If I hadn't told him where you were," Dick's voice trembles a bit, and he has to swallow to finish his sentence, "Then he wouldn't be dead, but you would. That's why I don't regret it."

She drops him as soon as he says it, and he crumples to the floor in a heap. Her hands are shaking, and his whole body is trembling slightly as he pulls himself back up.

"Why do you get to decide who lives and dies?" she asks, and for a moment, all she can see is the little Robin who was never good enough for Batman, struggling to be himself. Then it's just Dick Grayson, staring at her with a haunted look on his face.

He doesn't have a response.

He pushes past her without a word, gets to work on restoring the scans. He doesn't once look at her.

She doesn't care. She's tired of hurting and being hurt.

It's not fair.

* * *

_The mother sighs. "The Willow Tree will crack and the Willow Tree will mend, as people and trees always do. _

_Why the sudden interest in the most mournful wood?"_

* * *

Donna sleeps in Garth's room. She thinks it might be both the most stupid and most sentimental thing she's ever done, but right now, all she needs is to be close to him.

It's not as stupid as it seems, apparently, because in the morning, she feels a bit rested. She tries to tell herself that she's not avoiding the others, not avoiding Dick, but in this room, lying to herself seems stupid.

Life is so short.

So she doesn't lie.

She tells the truth. All of it.

The room is empty, and the only soul that could have possibly heard her is a goldfish, bought for Garth when he arrived as a joke. It swims aimlessly in circles, and if Donna's not imagining it, it seems subdued.

She pours her heart out to it anyway. Tells it how she loved Garth, even when he was an idiot, and that she didn't want to leave the Titans anymore. She tells it how she isn't sure sure if there's a Titans to leave and how they're barely holding together. Her voice drops to a whisper as she admits she wants to blame Dick for Garth's death, just so she can't blame herself. Out loud, she realizes how terrible that sounds, and decides she can't go on like this

Then and there, she decides to stop. She's coherent enough to think clearly, now that it's been more than a day. It wasn't her fault. It wasn't Dick's fault. She repeats these two thought until she believes it. The only person she can blame is the sniper that shot Garth, and Dick's already making plans.

When she thinks of Dick, there's a throbbing behind her eyes that feel something like regret. She should go apologize. She just can't bring herself to get out of bed.

* * *

_"There was a Willow Tree in the woods today," the child responded._

_"It sprung up almost like magic."_

* * *

She does get out of bed, in the end. It takes too long, and she wants to stay in the room forever, soak up all that is left of Garth. Garth waited for her for so long, it seemed like terrible karma that she would forever have to wait for him.

When she does leave the room, though, she feels strangely relieved. She feels… ready. She feels angry.

But not at herself, not at her teammates.

At _him_.

_Slade Wilson._

She hadn't thought it was possible to hate someone that much.

Dawn and Hank are eating breakfast at the kitchen island when she returns. They look at her with tired eyes, but they seem mostly relieved.

"Where's Dick?"

"In the training room," Hank answers, voice laced with regret.

Dawn raises her eyes to meet Donna's and nods her head in reassurance. "He's got a plan, we're going to do this. We're going to get Wilson."

Donna nods, the memory of a smile playing on her lips. "Of course we will."

"We're Titans."

* * *

_"There's no such thing as magic." The mother clicked her tongue._

_"Willows grow fast, but they have roots. Never forget that."_


End file.
